Huawei MediaPad M3 Review

Table of Contents

Introduction, Design & Features

The once-hot Android tablet market has turned decidedly ice-cold.

In fact, we saw only eight new, name-brand Android slates of any screen size hit our test bench in all of 2016. Three of those were Amazon Fire models, running Amazon's Android-derivative Fire OS. And a fourth was the Nvidia Shield Tablet K1, a modestly tweaked version running on the same hardware as the original model from mid-2014. Even sales of Apple’s iconic iPads appear to be on the downswing, with reports from the latest Apple earnings call indicating sales are down about 20 percent from a year ago.

Given that smartphone screens have continued to inch into the territory of small tablets in terms of size, perhaps it’s not surprising that many shoppers feel they don’t need both a phablet and a tablet. But for things like watching videos, playing games, and reading books or magazines, a larger-screen device still has its benefits.

That becomes apparent when using Huawei’s MediaPad M3. Its 8.4-inch IPS screen isn’t quite as big as 10-inch slates (not to mention the 12.9-inch Apple iPad Pro). But there’s still more than double the raw screen real estate here than on our Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge smartphone. Plus, the 2,560x1,600-pixel resolution and 400-nit brightness of the MediaPad M3 makes pixel-dense content look great, and the Harman Kardon-certified speakers sound better than anything we’ve heard from a smartphone speaker set.

As a mobile media-consumption device, Huawei's tablet is very easy on the eyes and ears. Its internal, Huawei-made HiSilicon Kirin 950 processor delivers mostly impressive performance, and the aluminum frame feels durable and a little luxurious. Our main design complaint is the placement of the power button, which, combined with the tablet’s narrow bezels, caused us too often to switch off the screen by mistake when reading or browsing the Web.

If you’re after a premium compact Android slate that rivals the iPad Mini 4 in terms of style, you should find the MediaPad M3 pleasing. But $299 still feels a tad expensive for a small tablet these days when budget slates like the Amazon Fire HD 8 sell for less than $100. And while the MediaPad M3 certainly looks and performs better than any budget tablet we've reviewed or handled, its battery life in our testing fell short of several similarly sized tablets that cost less.

Design & Features

With its white front, diamond-cut edges, and solid silver-metal back, not to mention the iOS-like rounded-corner icons used in the company's Emotion UI (EMUI) Android skin, it's clear that Huawei is attempting to ape the style of Apple's iPad. And we're OK with that, mostly because the MediaPad M3 does a good job where it counts.

Note that our review unit had a silver back, but "luxurious gold" is also available as a color option. Again, just like Apple devices.

The tablet feels solid and premium. At 0.71 pound, it's only slightly heavier than the iPad Mini 4's 0.65 pound, and the screen's 2,560x1,600 resolution offers nearly a million more pixels than the 2,048x1,536 resolution of the Apple iPad Mini 4, which starts at $100 more than Huawei's slate.

Taking a look at connectivity, ports, and buttons, the MediaPad M3 has about what we'd expect to find, along with a couple of pleasant and not-so-pleasant surprises. Starting at the top of the tablet, you'll find just the headphone jack and grille holes for one of the two Harman Kardon speakers. Also up here, on the front, is the sensor for the front-facing 8-megapixel camera. It's fixed-focus, but it captures images and video at much higher quality than most laptop Webcams.

Moving to the bottom edge, you'll find a tray-loading MicroSD card slot (of the kind that's more commonly found in phones), the micro-USB charging port, a pinhole microphone, and the second set of speaker grille holes...

In an ideal world, we'd prefer front-facing speakers rather than the side-firing type seen here. But their placement near the top (when holding the tablet in landscape orientation) means your fingers won't block or muffle the sound output. And the speakers in general are among the best we've heard on a tablet of this size. Sound gets surprisingly loud (enough to fill a mid-size room with ease), even kicking out some midrange and low end that you can feel, physically, when holding the tablet.

If anything, the speakers get too loud, because at top volume, music sounded harsh, with distorted highs overpowering the mids and lows. But if you keep the volume a couple notches from the top, the tablet produces excellent sound into the open air.

The left edge offers no buttons or ports, so let's move to the right, where we find our chief issue with the MediaPad M3's design.

The power button and volume rocker live a little more than halfway up the right side of the tablet, and they stick out from the edge distinctly, making them easy to find by feel, and easy to press. The problem is, they're too easy to find and press.

During the course of our testing, we pressed the power button (and thus switched off the screen) in error literally dozens of times when holding the tablet in portrait mode, mostly while reading in bed at night. The narrow side bezels make this a more likely circumstance, because there's no real place to grip the tablet, other than the sides and back. So our fingers tended to slide up the tablet body when attempting to adjust our grip during long reading sessions. Nearly every time we did this, we accidentally switched off the screen.

Our annoyance at this was minimized somewhat, though, by the fact that the fingerprint sensor that lives below the screen (in landscape orientation) is probably the best we've ever used. Over weeks of regular use, it never once failed to recognize our thumbprint on the first try. And mashing your thumb (or finger, whichever digits you register during the setup process) on the sensor when the screen is off both unlocks the tablet and powers on the screen in under a second.We hope this sensor makes its way into plenty of other devices, including our next phone.

The back of our MediaPad M3 review unit was mostly silver metal, though if you opt for the gold model, the hue will be different here, of course...

Like you see on many smartphones, the MediaPad M3 has a plastic strip at the top and bottom, presumably to improve Wi-Fi connectivity by allowing easier pass-through of the signal to the internal radio. Speaking of Wi-Fi, there's an interesting wrinkle here. The tablet's hardware supports the latest wireless spec for Wi-Fi, 802.11ac. And in some sales regions, both 2.4GHz and 5GHz are supported. But if you buy the tablet in the United States, you won't see any 5GHz networks on the tablet because, according to the specs page, "Products delivered to markets that impose FCC certification requirements do not support 802.11 a/ac at 5GHz Wi-Fi." We're not sure what stopped Huawei from taking the tablet through FCC certification for 5GHz Wi-Fi when so many other manufacturers don't seem to have a problem with this. At a guess, perhaps the company didn't want to pay the fees. But regardless, the device functioned just fine over our 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, both at home and in our office.

The other key thing on the back of the tablet is the 8-megapixel camera, which is equipped with an auto-focus feature. We've never put much importance on cameras in tablets, because tablets make for awkward (and, frankly, ridiculous-looking) image-snapping devices. Plus, most people buying a premium tablet also likely have a better camera sensor in their smartphone. That said, you can get good photos from the camera here, so long as what you're snapping isn't also moving. The sensor's auto-focus is quite slow compared to those typically found in high-end smartphones.

Moving back to the front of the tablet, the MediaPad M3's IPS screen is an absolute joy to view. Its high resolution is combined with a maximum 400-nit brightness, producing rich colors, deep blacks, and enough light to make the tablet usable outdoors (though the glare of the glossy screen can be a hindrance in direct sunlight). The Super AMOLED screens in Samsung's high-end devices may look a little better when placed side by side with the Huawei slate. But taking this tablet's screen on its own merits, we had no complaints. Photos, videos, digital magazines, and games all looked great.

Software

As impressed as we are with the MediaPad M3's hardware, we're not quite as jazzed about the software.

For starters, the tablet runs Android 6 ("Marshmallow"), rather than the newer and much improved Android 7.0 (also known by its code-name, "Nougat"). Nougat would be ideal for a tablet like this, as it offers native support for split-screen app viewing (that is, putting more than one app on the screen at once). But the company has made no promises about an update to the latest version of Android, and since this tablet was originally launched in September 2016, it's technically nearly six months old as we write this. Given many Android device makers' tendency to focus their resources on new devices, rather than supporting older smartphones and Android tablets that have already been bought and paid for (Nvidia is a rare exception to this rule), we would not hold out much hope for a major software update to the MediaPad M3.

Also, the EMUI skin looks nice enough, if you also happen to like the look of iOS, which it's clearly emulating. But those used to stock or near-stock Android may feel a bit lost at first. There's no app drawer listing all your installed apps, for one. And Huawei has ditched the usual capacitive buttons on either side of the home button for navigation. Instead, you need to quick-tap the home button/fingerprint sensor to go back, and long-press the same button to go to the home screen. Swiping the home button left or right brings up your recently used apps. For the most part, we found this fairly intuitive once we adjusted to it. But swiping the small fingerprint sensor to bring up open apps always felt awkward.

Our other gripe about the software here is that there's more of it than we'd like pre-installed out of the box. Here, for instance, is a look at the "Top Apps" folder...

This is the kind of thing we'd expect from a budget tablet, not one that sells for $299 or more. But at the very least, Huawei doesn't stop you from uninstalling the cruft. It took about a minute to remove most of the apps we knew we'd never use.

Table of Contents

Huawei MediaPad M3

Our Verdict:
Huawei's flagship compact Android tablet sports a stunning 8.4-inch screen and excellent speakers, along with Apple-like design and build quality. Our main quibble is with the battery life.

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